


Threshold

by hellkitty



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-11
Updated: 2015-06-11
Packaged: 2018-04-03 21:05:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4114921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Had one of those days you just want to come home and self-indulgently pillowfort under your favorite fictional characters. .____. </p>
<p>Enjoy my ever-expanding headcanon about How Many Ways Coma Is Fucked Up. Or not. This one's kind of weird and may be a wee squicky.  However, the Organic Mechanic is far more fun to write than he has any right to, and is the reason for the R rating (salty language)!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Threshold

It was night, and he felt restless.  

At least, he thought it was night: the Citadel was filled with its nighttime hush, like the air had gotten thick and heavy, like even sound was too tired from the day's long heat to travel far.  Coma shifted on his bed--a tangled mass of fabric over stone--before giving up, pushing himself up to sit, bare feet dangling over the floor. 

If he could sleep, he would have nightmares.  He always did, except after sex, when he fell into sleep so hard it was like breaking down into something below the level of dreams; a deep, animal slumber. But he could almost feel the nightmares now, like wild animals, things with wicked, tearing fangs and slavering eyes, circling his skull, waiting him out. And his room felt small--far too small, like the walls were leaning in, the rough cuts leering at him with hungry mouths, sucking all the air out, leaving him suffocating.

He had to get out. He had to leave, at least for a while, and hope that he could outrun the murky sourness in the back of his mind.  He had to at least try.

Coma knew his room well enough, even blind, to find the doorway, and even part of the corridor was familiar enough to his feet.  But beyond that, he had to trust his hands, skimming over the walls, and his nose, leading him toward the infirmary, the place that smelled of blood and fever and pain.  Maybe there the nightmares would lose his scent.  

***

There used to be an old saying, that it was nice to be needed, the Organic Mechanic thought, with a snort.  Fuck that. It was useful to be needed--he could speak his mind to Joe when ever the so-called ‘Immortan’ did something particularly idiotic--but ‘nice’ was not the word he’d use to describe being hauled out of bed at all hours of the night to deal with...whatever crisis his boys couldn’t handle.  

Which right now had him finger-deep in a War Boy’s thigh, trying to pry out a bit of ricochet shrapnel, around the tight, hot, red-streaked flesh of blood poisoning.  This, he thought, squinting, tilting his head to aim the headlamp more directly, was the exact, 180 degree shitstinking opposite of ‘nice’.

A sort of hissing breath got his attention, tearing his gaze, and his light, up from the claw-splayed wound, the light playing fast and unsettling on the eyeless face. Coma. Great.  Just what he needed.  Coma, just standing there, hands slack, shoulders sagged, looking like a thing from every kid’s nightmare.  “Eh, what do you want now?”

A restless shift of weight and a twitch of a lip, almost like a grimace.  

Having a conversation with a mute was...probably too accurate a fucking metaphor for what the Mechanic’s life had become, he thought. But what the hell. Futility was the watchword of the day. “Told you before; not gonna give you any more of that stuff just ‘cause you can’t sleep.”  He flipped him off, just because he could. For added ridiculousness.

The mouth pulled down into something like a pout. Or sulk. Fantastic. Exactly what he needed, exactly the thing, to bring the right soupcon of Shit He Did Not Want To Deal With to his day. Er. Night.  He'd sort that out later, which day to log this bit of shit into his diary.  “Listen. As you CAN’T see,” Because why not remind the guy he was blind? Fuck bedside manner.  That shit was overrated, “I’m kind of busy right now.” He sat back, scrubbing the back of one bloodied wrist on his forehead, scanning the row of bodies. “But two back. On the left. He’s probably dying tonight.”

The mute stood still, for a long moment, in that spooky, empty way he had of just...being there.  Fucking unnerving--the Mechanic thought, turning back to the wound, muttering as he had to mop it out of filled blood--the way you felt he was watching you when he so obviously...wasn’t.  

And when he looked up again, Coma was gone. No, not gone. Two back. On the left.

***

Coma could smell it on the War Boy--that almost mossy scent, under the stale smell of sweat and fever.  He stood by the side of the ledge for a long moment, listening to the jagged, unsteady breathing, like a soul rattling its way out of a brittle cage. This one, he thought.  This one. The Mechanic knew. He always knew. He moved, reaching one hand out, lightly, to find the War Boy’s far shoulder, then the surface behind it, levering himself up and over the weakened body, settling himself down along the War Boy’s body. He could feel the heat of the fever against him, burning the War Boy out, and he could feel, also, the gaze on him, the confusion and curiosity and wariness mixed together.

Coma couldn’t speak so he couldn’t explain that this insulated him, hid him from his own nightmares; those long, lonely stretches of dreamtime stitched into overgrown malignant memory.  He couldn’t explain that his hand moved, skipping over the War Boy’s face, feeling the juts of high cheekbones, rising to the surface against the softer, sunken flesh of his cheeks, the smooth brow, the almost aquiline contour of his nose, to remind himself that this wasn’t his mother’s face, that this was someone else on the teetering threshold of death. Someone he could be there for, witness pass, feel the last breath, the last separation of soul from body.  He’d missed it with her, too late, too afraid, her face already marblecold and bloodsticky, and all that had been left for him to feel, to sense, was the horror and fear and pain frozen on the twisted rictus of her mouth.   

This wasn’t her, this was someone else, real and unreal both, alike and unalike in ways he couldn’t explain, but needed.  

And the War Boy soothed, under his touch, the tension draining from his shoulders, neck softening. “I’m not afraid,” he whispered, finally, the touch breaking the lock of the words no one had been around to hear opened.  “To die, I mean.”  

Coma nodded, idly, his fingers dropping to find, and trace, a maze of scars on the War Boy’s chest, his touch light enough to be a lover’s.  

“Just that...I know what happens when I die.” He paused, taking a ragged breath of air from failing lungs. Valhalla, Coma thought, the eternal, glorious ride. It tempted almost everyone, a life far brighter and better than what any could have here. It had tempted him, but the feel of his mother's steel-hard face under his trembling fingers always interrupted, as if banning him from anything so bright and warm and chrome.

The Boy continued, struggling with breath and words both. But like a War Boy, fighting on, nonetheless.  “Can’t help thinking I’m missing a lot about living.”  His hand dropped to Coma’s on his chest, fingertips just brushing the knuckles, seeking touch.  Coma fanned his fingers, letting their hands twine together.  

He felt the War Boy turn to him, his head, his shoulder lifting with the intensity of his gaze.  “Am I?”

Coma had no eyes for tears, and no voice for lies. But he had a heart for heartbreak, so he pulled their linked hands to his mouth, pressing the battered, fever-dry knuckles against his lips, until the War Boy’s final flare of strength ebbed, curling himself around the fading body.  

The War Boy tried to speak, fluid in his lungs bubbling in his voice, but he managed to push one word out, one syllable, with the last of his breath--his name.  

Coma understood: the worst pain of dying was doing it alone, unrecognized, knowing you would be unwitnessed, unremembered, unmourned.

He would witness, in his way. He would remember, and mourn, each one, for the one he hadn’t witnessed, hadn’t been there for.  And he held the War Boy’s hand until the fingers went lax in his own, and the grey fingers of parted the thickest darkness of the nightmare night, and Coma took a strange, back-of-the-heart comfort at the smooth soothed half-smile he felt on the War Boy’s face. 


End file.
